To The Middle Of The World!

Well hello again!

Since we last spoke, we´ve been to the middle of the world, but more about that later.

Our bus to Otavalo was supposed to take 2 to 2 1/2 hours. In reality, it took 1 1/2.  We only discovered this when the ticket man started shouting at us to GET OFF as we´d already passed through Otavalo.  Dumped at the side of the road with our rucksacks, we starred down the hill at the town we were supposed to be dropped off in.  Take a bus or walk? We walked.

After an hour, and Anna exclaiming, ¨we´re not even close yet!¨ We found our hostel. The best kitchen yet! The hostel lady graciously gave us tea as she made up the room for us and then we took showers! If these overnight bus rides are good for anything, they sure do save us money on accomadation and shampoo!

Unfortunately we made it to Otavalo on Sunday, missing the ¨most massive, amazing¨ market in Ecuador by 1 day. However there were still a couple of little markets on, just not to the same scale. We bought charms (that must be a record for Anna) along with some gifts for people, you´ll just have to believe that they are good.  As it was a Sunday in South America, we did the only thing you can do, we wandered around and ate ice cream.  So far Ecuador is NOT doing well in the ice cream competition. So badly in fact, that we´ve now stopped eating Ecuadorian ice cream!

That evening we were faced with a very drunk hostel lady and an equally drunk irate man who claimed he was from Montreal.  Funnily enough, I´m not convinced that many Canadians have Eastern European accents. He also had the decency to tell Anna that they don´t use the Euro in Great Britain. That was a shock to both of us! And yes, he did know where we were from.

After our first good sleep in a while, we woke up and had a lunch of ceviche (the to-go verson) from a street vender. It was AMAZING!! Very different from the Peruvian version.

We finally met the owner of the hostel when he drove us to the train station and put us on the bus to Quito, (hmm, that´s impressive isn´t it) perhaps he drove us to the bus station. No 1 hour walks this time. What a lovely man!

We spent 2 days in Quito, which included a free tour of the Presidential Palace and a visit to the Bank Museum (for those of you that don´t know, Ecuador has changed it´s currency to the US dollar). We´ve decided that Quito is just a great city to walk around in, as the bits you want to see are very compact and the old down town is lovely. They also make these FANTASTIC grilled bananas - the lady selling them only thought it was a little strange when we took pictures of them.

We also visited the Basillica,which gave a great view of the city, once you made it up the dodgy ladders (neither one of our mother´s would have gone anywhere near those!) The coolest thing about this Basillica was that instead of there being gargoles, there were different galapagos animals! This included turtles, lizards and lots of different birds!

Then we caught the bus to the middle of the world!!! So there are actually 2 equator lines, the first is the one the French dude found in the 1700´s (it´s actually off by 250 meters, but not bad for a Frenchy from the 1700´s!). The real line, was found about 10 years ago using GPS and there is this amazing museum marking the spot. We had our passports stamped at BOTH spots.

At the museum we did a couple different experiments to determine that they weren´t lying ... these included standing an egg on a nail (sadly neither one of us passed this test), seeing which way water went down a drain in the north, the south and on the equator, two different strength tests (when you´re on the equator you don´t have any - we would have both been stronger than my brother) and we attempted to walk in a straight line with our eyes shut (Anna says this was like being drunk ... )

We also learned about the creepy fish that swim up your pee if you dare to pee in the Amazon River and how the indigenous people strunk heads.

We´re off to Latacunga next in hope of seeing a crater lake. I hope we find it.

Anna and Steph